Google will beat Apple in this area too - the most sued company of all time. With Oracle and MPEG LA clamping on them this decade will see Google beefing up its legal team to new heights. Apple took that reign from Microsoft and now Google is next.

You're not enabling innovation by paying the cost. Innovation occurs irrespective of patents. Patents are just a way to make money and control software, they do not encourage innovation.

I can't think of a single company that would stop innovating if there were no patents. There's tremendous incentive to innovate -- sales, market position, and brand image.

Personally, patents have prevented me from innovating. I've implemented lots of cool things in the software I develop, and had to remove them because part of it infringes on some vague patent some big company, or some troll company, owns.

Maybe the patent system isn't the best way to protect IP and it is a mess, I agree. I have a friend who has an audio patent for his invention, pain in the a$$ situation, but at this stage of the game, while his patent was challenged by the trolls (who only had vaporware) and they sort of won because the judge was clueless, at least he had something as protection. Without it, no recourse at all.

Q: How do you tell a Google executive is lying?
A: His lips are moving.

How original.

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That's total bull.

First, your example is wrong. I use Safari - which is based on webkit. Safari is proprietary. Just like all the other browsers based on Webkit.

Chrome is BSD/GPL. The only part you can't take is the Google Chrome logo and trademark.

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Second, we were talking about user space - where proprietary software outnumbers 'open' software many fold. Yes, for servers, open source is common, but still doesn't greatly outnumber proprietary software.

Perhaps the point is the quantity of "open" software vs. the quantity of use.

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Nonsense - it's not patent trolling at all. MPEG-LA is responsible for licensing a wide range of patents and codecs. That's their business. As part of that business they have the right to enforce their patents and find infringers.

That "wide" range of codecs is anything MPEG, and 1394. For that matter, all the patents they already know about should be all they need to start a case against webm. Going out of your way to ask the world if you have a patent against another competing codec to come together so we can fight it just because it now is gaining momentum is quite trolling.

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Obviously coming from someone who has never created anything of value.

We live in a free market society. People create things so that they can profit from them. If you remove the profit motive, the incentive for creation drops dramatically. There would be VASTLY less innovation if people couldn't profit from them. Patents help to ensure that people can profit from their innovations.

Sounds great in theory, but in practice it is a little more complicated than that. Submarine patents can be hidden for years until someone else makes a successful product, killing any profit to be made. The entire mobile industry is in a holdup due to all the stupid lawsuits filed.

Kinda hard to want to invent stuff when much more powerful people already will shoot you down.

And quality, OGG and WebM are horrible, I as a web designer cringe at the thought that my well crafted videos are only being served by those two codecs I would pay extra, myself, to be able to use H.264 (exclusively) and well, I do pay for it anyway since I do own at least five Apple devices and soon to get more. You get what you pay for, I have worked with php solutions for years now and I pay developers gladly for the php shopping carts, or CMS programs. Sure you can get semi-free crap coded in China, but that is what you have, semi-free or cheap crap from China so you spend your precious time to troubleshoot so it will function (maybe).

No, so over it. Just freakin' pay for it, (unless it is Adobe overpriced crap, always on the look out for alternatives for that!)

That said I still have to waste my time to encode a video three times so I can serve it up as html5, it is a major pain, but dealing with Flash is even worse, so I just do it. But I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, want H264 off the table. In case I wasn't clear, I mean EVER!

Just because webm exists doesn't mean the end of h.264. I also fail to see your "horrible" when I have both examples of 720p material sitting right here. If by OGG you mean the audio portion vorbis consistently ties aac and is a little better at lower bitrates.

... Safari uses QuickTime for video and IE uses DirectShow for video -- if you install the WebM plugin for these systemwide (which Google has or will make available), they will play in Safari and IE.

The only codec that will not have any way of playing in all browsers will be h264...

This is not true.

Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.

That "wide" range of codecs is anything MPEG, and 1394. For that matter, all the patents they already know about should be all they need to start a case against webm. Going out of your way to ask the world if you have a patent against another competing codec to come together so we can fight it just because it now is gaining momentum is quite trolling.

MPEG-LA is simply asking the people who are most familiar with their code to make an assessment of infringement. While MPEG-LA has plenty of lawyers and such, I doubt that have a full staff of engineers with access to the source code from their various members.

Nonsense - it's not patent trolling at all. MPEG-LA is responsible for licensing a wide range of patents and codecs. That's their business. As part of that business they have the right to enforce their patents and find infringers.

It's by definition patent trolling. Even your justification for it is EXACTLY what patent trolls do. Patent trolls buy up patents and make a business out of their "right to enforce their patents and find infringers".

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Obviously coming from someone who has never created anything of value.

Yeah, that must be it. I'm not going to list the things that I've done, but I'm a professional software developer that has to play the patent game myself. I've got patents with my name next to them, I ship software millions of people use.

I don't know if you're in the same boat, but your comment is not necessary, ignorant, and really just shows you've nothing valuable to contribute to the discussion.

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Patents help to ensure that people can profit from their innovations.

The problem is the definition of "innovation". The vast majority of software patents are junk patents. They're not "innovation", they're just things someone gets around to doing first. I know this first hand.

Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.

I was speaking in the context of native browsers (hence the word "browsers", and not "plugins").

Google has already re-encoded YouTube into WebM. I used to work for a major source of videos in the Canadian market, and they're in the process of WebM-encoding now. It's trivial work to do when you already have the infrastructure, as most do. Other major providers like Vimeo and BrightCove have also already done it. It's not only not "highly unlikely", it's basically already done.

My comment is that if you take off the shelf browsers and use HTML5 video (NOT FLASH...I thought we all agreed Flash is awful?), WebM will be played from every browser (provided you have the free QT plugin on OS X and WMP Plugin on Windows). Firefox will never play h264 in HTML5.

As for the comments on WebM quality -- you guys should take a look at the git log of libvpx. There's been a phenomenal amount of work done in a short period of time to improve both the quality and the speed. Most of the problems with WebM quality (which are grossly overstated) are due to immature encoders. It's not really fair to evaluate the codecs themselves by comparing x264-encoded videos with libvpx-encoded videos, because x264 is excellent quality and has been refined over many years with massive quality improvements. libvpx hasn't had that time to mature yet, but it will.

MPEG-LA is simply asking the people who are most familiar with their code to make an assessment of infringement. While MPEG-LA has plenty of lawyers and such, I doubt that have a full staff of engineers with access to the source code from their various members.

And why would they need to do this when each patent holder would/should do this themselves, without "pooling" together?

Did Google ask for a patent pool? Did the former On2 need one? I mean here's MPEG-LA basically saying, "We always are making it easy for people to pay our members money."

How nice of them to now start making one so soon after Google dropping h.264 from Chrome.

Again, MPEG-LA doing what it owns, licensing MPEG, is quite fine with me. Claiming to own VP8 and making a pool out of it is another. It's like that patent troll suing apple over the ipod for claiming to have invented the DAC.

Look, them going after someone for their "IP" isn't so much the issue with me. It's the whole "let's wait until you become popular, then we'll nickel and dime you into the ground."

And why would they need to do this when each patent holder would/should do this themselves, without "pooling" together?

Did Google ask for a patent pool? Did the former On2 need one? I mean here's MPEG-LA basically saying, "We always are making it easy for people to pay our members money."

MPEG-LA does, in fact, make it easy to pay their members money. But it would be far more cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive if licensees needed to deal with each patentholder separately. I am pretty sure you know this already.

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How nice of them to now start making one so soon after Google dropping h.264 from Chrome.

Again, MPEG-LA doing what it owns, licensing MPEG, is quite fine with me. Claiming to own VP8 and making a pool out of it is another. It's like that patent troll suing apple over the ipod for claiming to have invented the DAC.

Look, them going after someone for their "IP" isn't so much the issue with me. It's the whole "let's wait until you become popular, then we'll nickel and dime you into the ground."

MPEG-LA does not claim to own VP8 - they believe that VP8 includes infringing software.

As far as why now and not earlier, there are two reasons:

However popular VP6 and other On2 codecs were, they were nearly invisible to the vast majority of computer users (so, not worth the time and effort)

Google picked a fight by removing support for H.264

I doubt Google is really surprised by any of this. In fact, it is likely the reason they chose not to indemnify those who implemented VP8.

The MPEG-LA license is really pretty small - it seems the most anyone would pay would be $6.5M per year per product type. Someone like Apple likely pays the max for both the encoder/decoder in their OS as well as paying a separate fee for individual titles in iTunes. Google can certainly afford this, as well. It could hurt smaller developers and content providers but I am not feeling too sorry for Mozilla who has a lot of their bills paid by Google.

Neither Apple, Google or MPEG-LA made the rules; they are all simply playing by the rules as they exist. Well, Google is kind of hoping to skirt around the rules but now it appears that they will likely not succeed. If you want change, it's time to start contacting your elected officials.

I'm not sure how this plays out. Google could pay whatever licensing is determined which will most likely be reasonable and continue with VP8. I think the more likely outcome is that VP8 will die much as VC1 did.

One more thing...defenders of WebM forget that this whole bit of MPEG-LA checking out a competitor for patent violations has happened before. Microsoft developed VC-1 as an alternative to H.264 and offered it as an alternative for the potentially lucrative Blu-Ray market. They even offered it to standards bodies. Then the MPEG-LA looked at it and discovered that it was riddled with already used patents in the MPEG-LA patent pool.

Microsoft had a couple of choices. Either fight the MPEG-LA in court for years and suffer the real possibility of losing (and having to pay royalties and treble damages) or join the patent pool. In the end, they joined the patent pool and managed to get VC-1 approved as an alternate encoding standard for Blu-Ray anyway.

Microsoft chose the practical choice and it paid off for the industry. Microsoft makes no money off the patent pool when you subtract the royalties they have to pay. But the industry got a chance to move forward on one standard that is used EVERYWHERE. Web video? Check. Broadcast video? Check. Satellite video (including the satellites)? Yup. Mobile devices (phones, tablets). You bet. Military applications? Remember the Wikileaks video? Do you think it would have been easy to distribute to the press had it not been encoded in something they already knew how to play?

Google is betting on the might of its size and influence combined with the market dominance of Youtube to bring WebM to the forefront. The whole thing was a play to marginalize Apple and Microsoft in the mobile web video space. But the move pissed off nearly everyone who actually produces video content for a living since up until WebM, their job was a lot easier, especially with Flash video falling by the wayside.

Just because webm exists doesn't mean the end of h.264. I also fail to see your "horrible" when I have both examples of 720p material sitting right here. If by OGG you mean the audio portion vorbis consistently ties aac and is a little better at lower bitrates.

Not by it's existence, but everyone who thinks open source is more important than having code done right (i.e. swallowed Googles BS) is insisting it is going to be the standard codec. I was responding to the thinking that Webm will save us all. So, now all of us on the coding end have to work triple hard to basically serve up one video (encode in Ogg, WebM and H.264). Thanks a lot.

I tried encoding the Ogg/WebM versions with the same compression as I encoded the H.264, I do want to switch to html 5 video now, not later. I just couldn't get the quality to be as good at the same file size as the h.264 one. The videos were horribly obviously much lower quality. For the project I was working on, smallest file size was very important. With the H.264 version I got great quality and great compression. So now anyone viewing my websites with Firefox and Chrome will see the crappy quality video, so yes I have issues with that. And I have moved on from Flash, so the fallback for Flash in the html5 code is only for older browsers not modern browsers so it won't play the H.264 video via FLash Player with Firefox or Chrome.

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Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody

This is not true.

Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.

Yes, but as I posted above, modern browsers will not play it by default in an html5 tag, it will serve up the video codec for the browser and not the Flash player even with the Flash fallback code, that is only for browsers that can't read html5 tags.

Google is betting on the might of its size and influence combined with the market dominance of Youtube to bring WebM to the forefront. The whole thing was a play to marginalize Apple and Microsoft in the mobile web video space. But the move pissed off nearly everyone who actually produces video content for a living since up until WebM, their job was a lot easier, especially with Flash video falling by the wayside.

Maybe the patent system isn't the best way to protect IP and it is a mess, I agree. I have a friend who has an audio patent for his invention, pain in the a$$ situation, but at this stage of the game, while his patent was challenged by the trolls (who only had vaporware) and they sort of won because the judge was clueless, at least he had something as protection. Without it, no recourse at all.

Without software patents, your friend wouldn't be sued by some vaporware patent troll in the first place. Think about that for a second.

Sure, other people might be able to copy what he did more easily, but he would also be free to incorporate other people's good idea in his own product. Then it all comes down to who did a better job integrating the features, and better at marketing. Much better system than submitting to the basically tech illiterate lawyers and judges.

Just remove them altogether. There is no such thing as software patents outside the US anyway. They may not be slowing innovation now but lets look at this in a couple of years.

Just think, if apple won all their lawsuits and ended up the sole supplier of smart phones. They would have no motivation to improve that god awful notification system. There would never be proper multi tasking, the processor would never improve at the same rate. The only that win are the apple senior management and us consumers get screwed.

Tell that to Nokia, at least one of the suits they lodged against Apple in the UK involves software.

Better than my Bose, better than my Skullcandy's, listening to Mozart through my LeBron James limited edition PowerBeats by Dre is almost as good as my Sennheisers.

First of all, I don't believe software patents should exist. While I'm sure some software algorythms are truly innovative, there are just far too many one-click shopping patents out there. The US patent office is in a clear conflict-of-interest situation, because the more stupid patents they approve, the more money they make. Conversely, the less they look for prior art, the less cost they incur and the more money they make.

Having said that, all of the big industry players have agreed that software patents are among the rules of the game, and Google has decided its "above the law" in this respect, despite the fact that they've filed patents of their own.

The only way out of this mess is to abolish software patents. This way, no cross-licensing agreements need to exist, and Google will be on the same footing as everybody else, as opposed to trying to get a leg up.

The only clause for losing the rights to a license over webm is if you sue the webm organization. That's to use it as a bargaining chip if MPEG-LA holders decide to sue.

I can't say for sure because I'm not a patent lawyer, but I've read the WebM licensing terms, and they read something along the lines of 'taking part in or facilitating patent litigation against WebM', which in legalese could just as well imply that signing a cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA to ensure you can keep selling your VP8-based product would also mean that Google invalidates your WebM license. You _are_ 'facilitating' or 'taking part in' patent litigation if you would in that case, because by signing some cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA you'd basically admit VP8 infringes on H264 patents (why else would you negotiate with them in the first place)

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Nowhere does MPEG-LA grant any indemification either if another patent holder sues over h.264. While the situation appears better it took over a decade for all the patent lawsuits to be cleared up over the ancient MPEG1-Layer III audio codec.

You're missing the whole point behind a patent pool. The fact that almost every consumer-electronics and video giant in the world is part of the MPEG-LA means that no-one in their right mind will ever even think of suing them for patent infringement. The sheer amount of patents in the pool and the almost unlimited pockets of the patent holders would obliterate every other company that holds video encoding patents. I know it isn't pretty, but that's what patents and patent pools are for: to assure mutual destruction in case of a patent war. Why else do you think big companies like Microsoft and Apple build huge patent portfolios? They _know_ they infringe on each others patents, but they also know it is not in their best interest to start patent litigation against each other because it will boomerang back at them.

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Except for the fact that On2's work predates H.264 and there is a chance that MPEG are liable for infringement. VP8/webm is inferior as a codec, but that is partly because they didn't implement the one main feature that could make it better, b-frames, because they didn't want to step on MPEG's patents.

VP8 most definitely doesn't predate H264, the H264 standard evolved from earlier ITU standards and has been in development for 2 decades. It's also not true that VP8's main shortcoming is lack of B-frames, there are multiple other things stripped out from the codec to sidestep H264 patents (adaptive quantization comes to mind). Google for 'x264 vp8 analysis' to find an extremely detailed analysis of VP8 that clearly shows how VP8 is nothing more than 'H264 minus all the good stuff'.

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There are probably many aspects of H.264 that are not software based, but this whole argument that patents are necessary to protect work is a bit ridiculous; copyright grants the necessary protection needed for software.

You know I used to think the same a few years ago, until I started working for a company that built advanced software solutions that relied on interoperability with tools from other vendors. Copyright might be sufficient for closed and proprietary systems, but not for open standards such as H264. By publishing (or leaking) the specifications required to implement H264, you've basically given away everything. No-one even needs to reverse engineer anything at all, they can just implement the spec and profit from it as though they invented it themselves. That's what I meant when I said "if there's just one example where software patents make sense it would be video encoding". The world is not served by proprietary codecs that only work on some systems supported by the vendor, and it is also not served by a complete stalling of any investment or progress in the development of better video codecs.

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Patents were never meant to protect ideas, nor math or software, yet the stupid patent office grants them day in and day out.

H264 is neither 'math' nor 'software', it is a complete pipeline of multiple interconnected parts and technologies, some of which are specified using traditional math, some of which are specified as data interfaces, some of which are specified as (pseudo) code snippets. The specification is far more complex than just a few mathematical expressions or a few lines of code. If you really want to play the strawman card and point to the stupid patent office and how they should not grant software patents I know a few counter examples: H264 is a billion times more complex than a paperclip, a 3M post-it note, or the cover on your cup of starbucks coffee, yet those are all patented.

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Apple's multi touch patents are a good example of this. They didn't invent a multi-touch screen, just a gesture and the whole scrolling routine. The problem with this is the idea is implemented 100% in software, and typically in software you can accomplish tasks only one way. What if I find a different way to implement that idea/feature in software? Am I still infringing?

Apple patenting a sliding switch on a screen is just a software implementation of a hardware switch. Nothing new, nothing novel about it; just a software routine made to work as a switch on software. Yet it was granted a patent. Now those who use android are liable because it uses a connecting dot system to unlock the phone, which is more novel and non obvious that apple's idea by far. Neither deserve nor need patent protection. Each requires their own work and programming to implement, and as long as neither steals source code to do the work, it isn't stealing the mythical "IP".

These are all interesting examples some of which are borderline trivial, but that's not the point. Like I said: the patent system _is_ rotten, it _is_ being abused, and there _are_ trivial patents and software solutions that should never ever have been patentable. That doesn't mean that there _are not_ software systems or solutions that _do_ deserve to be patentable, because they are non-trivial to invent, yet easy to reverse-engineer. That's what I mean with 'the world is not always black vs white or good vs evil', there are all kinds of shades of grey in between, and in my view, H264 is much closer to white than it is to black.

I don't think you understand what is going on. MPEG-LA is doing just what you suggest. It is asking it's members now if any of them think Google's format infringes their patents. If so, MPEG-LA wants to pool those patents together and offer licensing for the infringing patents BEFORE Google offers the format. In other words, BEFORE Google's format becomes entrenched. Seems fair to me.

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Originally Posted by sprockkets

And why would they need to do this when each patent holder would/should do this themselves, without "pooling" together?

Did Google ask for a patent pool? Did the former On2 need one? I mean here's MPEG-LA basically saying, "We always are making it easy for people to pay our members money."

How nice of them to now start making one so soon after Google dropping h.264 from Chrome.

Again, MPEG-LA doing what it owns, licensing MPEG, is quite fine with me. Claiming to own VP8 and making a pool out of it is another. It's like that patent troll suing apple over the ipod for claiming to have invented the DAC.

Look, them going after someone for their "IP" isn't so much the issue with me. It's the whole "let's wait until you become popular, then we'll nickel and dime you into the ground."

Just remove them altogether. There is no such thing as software patents outside the US anyway. They may not be slowing innovation now but lets look at this in a couple of years.

Just think, if apple won all their lawsuits and ended up the sole supplier of smart phones. They would have no motivation to improve that god awful notification system. There would never be proper multi tasking, the processor would never improve at the same rate. The only that win are the apple senior management and us consumers get screwed.

You seem to think that patents stifle competition. That's completely false. Let's say someone patents something. Others can't produce that thing. However, say those "others" have the drive to beat the dude who has the patent. The others will focus their energies on creating something better than the patented thing.

Bunch of hypocrites? Last time I looked google did not threaten a law suit, they merely said they were displeased. In fact I can't remember the last time google sued anyone. They don't believe in software patents either.

Software patents kill innovation. Patenting your software is lazy. It means you no longer have to innovate, you just sue everyone else that does try and innovate in the same space.

Google was hypocritical because by their own methodology they PROVED MS didn't copy Google search results. Google paid it's own employees wages to feed biased signal data into Microsoft search signals via IE searches on bogus Google planted topics. If Google hadn't had it's own employees do 10's of thousands of searches on those bogus searches during the two week period they "stung" MS, MS would have never registered the search algorithm signal on the bogus items.

You read that? Google didn't only create the bogus items, they paid their own employees to figure out how MS ranked things via the IE search history, and then actively and explicitly fed mass amounts of "fake data" into that signal channel. Why do you think the controversy died so fast? A couple folks called Google on it, and they realized after the fact they busted themselves by their own methodology.

On a separate but related note, go ahead and be uncomfortable about MS using the search field they way they do. That is a bit creepy and underhanded, but it never resulted and couldn't have resulted in MS copying Google search results. It only resulted in MS being told in that creepy manner that those odd Google pages existed and should be indexed because lots of searches for them implied they were interesting.

You don't address the issue. A video format can be made up of many patentable ideas. Such formats are complex. For instance, Mpeg-2 is covered by 39 different US patents. So, while it may be the case that WebM brought some unique patentable ideas to the table, that doesn't mean it doesn't also infringe on other patents. I am not an expert on the topic, but there are many good articles by experts on the Internet. One Steve Jobs allegedly pointed to. Most experts think WebM operates in a way that is uncomfortably similar to the way the video formats managed by MPEG-LA. If Google were comfortable with WebM being unhindered by others patents, it would indemnify users. It is choosing not to do so.

I am not rooting for MPEG-LA. I think our patent system stinks. I just find that Google is hypocritical and it's motives have to be suspect. It touts openess on one hand, and then accuses Microsoft of stealing its search results. Further, Google has publicly stated it is investing no resources into improving WebM. That is tragic being that the format needs a lot of work to be near as functional as H-264. Moreover, it says it wants to only support open standards, but has embraced Flash lovingly.

It is better to work with the devil you know then the devil you don't. Google's move brings uncertainty to online video. Companies like Apple don't want to be forced to supporting WebM because it opens them up to patent lawsuits. With H-264, they might have to pay a licensing fee, but it is reasonable and that is better then worrying about patent liability from a shaky format that Google is merely offering so that it can save some money and control licensing.

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Originally Posted by sprockkets

VP8 aka WebM is NOT patent free; it's patented like anything else and those patents were purchased by Google and they licensed it into the open.

Sorry, but this is just more BS from MPEG-LA. They are nothing but a patent troll organization. They didn't care about VP6 when it was used all over the web, nor would they ever work with Ziph to make sure VP3 wasn't patent encumbered, and now only care about VP8 now that Google made it into the open domain.

You want MPEG-LA to win? This same organization is suing for royalties from apple and others over BS patents regarding phones they got. Sorry, the MPEG part of the name used to mean something, now all they do is make "patent pools" for anything they come across.

Bingo, you nailed it. Microsoft asked its IE users for permission to index their web browsing activity, which of course is going to include some Google search results. That is one factor of many that Microsoft claims it uses in coming up with search results. Google gamed Microsoft's system. First, Google opted for its employees to allow Microsoft to index their browsing habits. Second, Google created some obscure of the wall searches that Google's employees repeatedly feed into Internet Explorer. Third, no other users on the internet were making those same searches, so Microsoft's normal algorithms couldn't come up with any results for this whacky search requests. Yet, because Google's employees feed IE these phony search results, Microsoft search engine did notice some people on IE were making searches using the bogus search. When it's other criteria failed, Microsoft gave Google's employees the only results it had, namely those from Google's IE users who opted into Microsoft's voluntary indexing system.

I personally think Microsoft's method is smart. Further, Google's Chrome does the same thing. Just Google's Chrome doesn't ask permission.

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Originally Posted by Hiro

Google was hypocritical because by their own methodology they PROVED MS didn't copy Google search results. Google paid it's own employees wages to feed biased signal data into Microsoft search signals via IE searches on bogus Google planted topics. If Google hadn't had it's own employees do 10's of thousands of searches on those bogus searches during the two week period they "stung" MS, MS would have never registered the search algorithm signal on the bogus items.

You read that? Google didn't only create the bogus items, they paid their own employees to figure out how MS ranked things via the IE search history, and then actively and explicitly fed mass amounts of "fake data" into that signal channel. Why do you think the controversy died so fast? A couple folks called Google on it, and they realized after the fact they busted themselves by their own methodology.

On a separate but related note, go ahead and be uncomfortable about MS using the search field they way they do. That is a bit creepy and underhanded, but it never resulted and couldn't have resulted in MS copying Google search results. It only resulted in MS being told in that creepy manner that those odd Google pages existed and should be indexed because lots of searches for them implied they were interesting.

Sounds great in theory, but in practice it is a little more complicated than that. Submarine patents can be hidden for years until someone else makes a successful product, killing any profit to be made. The entire mobile industry is in a holdup due to all the stupid lawsuits filed.

Kinda hard to want to invent stuff when much more powerful people already will shoot you down.

Well, patents are important, but as they work in the US it gets wrong. And this is not only in software. So to get this right, you have to broaden the discussion a bit and also include the American legal system. I won't try to explain, but the legal system in the US has a few things not really working for anybody else but the lawyers.

First, your example is wrong. I use Safari - which is based on webkit. Safari is proprietary. Just like all the other browsers based on Webkit.

Second, we were talking about user space - where proprietary software outnumbers 'open' software many fold. Yes, for servers, open source is common, but still doesn't greatly outnumber proprietary software.

Sorry idiot but you are still using webkit when you open safari - ie you ARE using open source software. The proprietary bit is just a front end and a javascript engine. WEBKIT IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT YOU USE EVERYTIME YOU OPEN SAFARI.

And like I said, the majority of times you visit a website you are using open source software since you are calling the open source software on the server. I am sure you agree that more websites are accessed everyday than any other piece of software apart from OSs themselves. So how the hell can you imply open source is tiny and unimportant?

Sorry idiot but you are still using webkit when you open safari - ie you ARE using open source software. The proprietary bit is just a front end and a javascript engine. WEBKIT IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT YOU USE EVERYTIME YOU OPEN SAFARI.

And like I said, the majority of times you visit a website you are using open source software since you are calling the open source software on the server. I am sure you agree that more websites are accessed everyday than any other piece of software apart from OSs themselves. So how the hell can you imply open source is tiny and unimportant?

I see that logic isn't your strong point.

The overwhelming majority of web sites are accessed via proprietary software. The fact that the proprietary software has some open source code inside is a red herring. People buy and use proprietary software vastly more than they 'buy' and use open source software.

The point that escapes you open source nazis is that developers have a choice. They are free to write open source software if they wish and they are free to write commercial and/or proprietary software if they wish. You seem to think that you have a right to take away the proprietary option and leave them only the option to use open source.

Great idea - let's extend that to the work place. You presumably work for a living at a job you get paid for (ignoring the more likely scenario that you're a pre-teen living in Mommy and Daddy's house). You also have the option to volunteer your time to various charities. I think that volunteering your time is a good thing - and companies shouldn't be able to make a profit off of the sweat of their employees, so I think there should be a new rule that EVERYONE must work as a volunteer and not have a paid job. After all, your work should be free for everyone to benefit from at no charge.

"I'm way over my head when it comes to technical issues like this"Gatorguy 5/31/13

Sex is essential for men. So going by Google's logic no women should be protected by law if a man wants to have sex with her. Sex should be open and free. Every man's daughter or wife should be open to any other man who wants to have sex with her. So also with patents. Patents should be free and should not be encumbered with protection of the law. With this kind of logic, it would be a matter of time before America got itself shafted from behind.

You seem to think that patents stifle competition. That's completely false. Let's say someone patents something. Others can't produce that thing. However, say those "others" have the drive to beat the dude who has the patent. The others will focus their energies on creating something better than the patented thing.

not true. look up the 'Wright Brothers' and read about patents they held.

If they are serious about making a free codec, no one can stop them, they just have to not use technology owned by anyone. As with everything in life you can get a good job done by a professional, but they will expect to be paid, or you can take the el-cheapo route. In this case the el-cheapo route means your file sizes are bigger and your images are lower quality.